


The Angler's Loop

by thelongcon (rainer76)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Amnesia fic, Bondage, Empathy Disorder, Hannibal would fight for Will, M/M, Medical Kink, Murder, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Smitten Hannibal, endless apologies, kink aspects, this is so damn dubious
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-10-05 06:57:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10300322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/thelongcon
Summary: He’ll keep Hannibal on the mast until he has nothing left to give, until he’s soft and empty inside, until he comes with nothing more than a moan of worship.He’ll give it up; Will thinks hazily. He’ll say my name wantonly.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The Angler's Loop: a knot which forms a fixed loop. Useful for fine or slippery line, it is one of the few loop knots that holds well in a bungee cord.  
> \- from the Wiki's list of sea knots

Will meant to kill them.

Hannibal had seen people who had fallen from a height – Alana and her shattered pelvis among them. Elderly citizens who’d toppled off ladders while cleaning household gutters. People who had suicided from steel bridges into frigid water below. Or teenagers goaded into quarry dives by their ‘pals’ while blind drunk.

The inebriated, ironically, tended to survive such calamities.

In proximity to the earth’s surface gravitational acceleration is nine point eight metres per second, times squared. Meaning an object in motions speed will increase by nine point eight metres (or thirty-two feet) per second every second until moment of impact. The cliffs lining his property are mercifully straight – a godsend, since Will didn’t attempt to leap outward, or provide any measure of space between their falling bodies and the cliff-face, and Hannibal doesn’t fancy being dashed against an outcropping of rock - but he would wager the average height anywhere between sixty to seventy metres. With a drop of over two hundred feet into the swell below: it will be the equivalent of running into a brick wall at over eighty miles per hour.

Hannibal saw a lot of car accidents in his time at John Hopkins. He knows what the end result looks like.

He does two things. Hannibal twists mid-air to ensure the younger man is beneath him, to take the brunt of the injuries. He allows Will the sovereignty of his choice; to experience the repercussion of his design: to break the surface tension of the water _first._ Hannibal’s survival instinct is too finely honed, too newly released from prison to die idle. It can only be switched off for so long. And the other: Hannibal turns his hands into fists, ducks his head under Will’s chin to keep his neck in alignment, and wraps his legs tightly around the other man as he rides him down. The thighs are the strongest muscle grouping in the body; least likely to break their hold on impact.

People have survived greater heights – notably Vesna Vulovic - who had the misfortune of being on a plane that exploded at thirty-three thousand, three hundred, and thirty-three feet, but people have died from less than a metre, who tripped down a stair and broke their neck. There’s no certainty to the cruel whims of the gods - only their ironic amusement at humanity's expense.

Lastly, Hannibal allows his body to relax because all told, if they _do_ die together after slaughtering the Dragon, c’est la vie.

He has no regrets. No qualms. He is entirely problem free. This moment cannot be surpassed – _it’s everything he’s ever wanted_ – but Hannibal thought the same at Uffizi gallery, too, when they shared a seat, openly wounded and gazing at one another.

He thought it when Will brought him a slab of Freddie Lounds to eat, so they could experiment with loto saltado, a simple dish for a first step. He thought it when his trap closed shut and Will was charged for his crimes, Hannibal had been giddy with triumph, knowing he had outwitted them all.

He felt it when they first met: when Will knelt on a kitchen floor, blood speckled and panicked; and timed his breathing to match Hannibal’s own steady exhales. A series of events that felt momentous at the time - it’s what being with Will means - each experience an unexpected, unpredictable, gift. This moment cannot be surpassed, he reasons, until the exact instant it is.

He doesn’t begrudge Will, but Hannibal _wants_ to grab every conceivable moment by the teeth and clamp his jaws shut: to let the flavours and colours of life anoint him.  But if it has to end badly and it has to end well he’ll allow Will his choice - he’ll follow Will down now - for a shot of Even Stevens later.

If one (or both) survives the fall then the greatest threat is the multiple fractures that await them. The unconsciousness. The inevitable drowning as the water closes over their heads. Technically you can survive the drop – stunned into immobility, limbs smashed into smithereens – it’s the water that will finish you.

Hannibal hits the Atlantic half a second after Will does, on the exact same trajectory. It takes his breath away. For all his multiple languages there are no adequate words: only the agony is transcendent.

***

“Is that my name?”

“No. It is not.”

He's unsurprised.  Sebastian Grant has a riot of brown curls, a surly stare, and a mouth that wants to tic downward on one side. He takes a portrait like a criminal – which is to say - his passport photo looks like a mug-shot.  He looks exhausted, bruised under the eyes. Information has his birthday listed as August second, 1977, place of birth: Louisiana. He looks younger than the man in the mirror, less fractured.

He knows Lucas isn’t the other man’s real identity either. The only name he has is an alias and Hannibal’s gentle insistence memory will return, but until it does, one name to remember is easier to manage. Less confusion that way.

He’s pretty sure that’s a tall order of bullshit. “Why Sebastian?” he asks, flicking through the booklet.

There are immigration stamps for leaving the country, one entry stamp for Belgium, all of it forged. He’s not sure if he’s the type of person to ask for stamps in his passport - but leaves the personality quirk alone.

“You look like a Sebastian.” The other man regards him frankly and then amends with a sigh. “Or you did.”

“I don’t _feel_ like a Sebastian.” He scrubs a hand over his newly shorn hair. It's growing in, slowly, the colour dark as a wet seal. He bares his teeth at the other man, knowing the swell of nostalgia for loose curls isn’t his. Sebastian Grant, he says aloud in the mirror, and frowns. “It sounds too long. Seb? Sebby?”

Hannibal looks visibly pained. “I’d prefer not.”

“My name used to be short.”

“You answered to a hypocoristic.”

Sebastian meets his eyes in the mirror. “You’re going to tell me what it is,” he declares, loftily.

Sebastian knows his reactions are off – fear/paranoia/anxiety - the type of emotion _expected_ from severe retrograde amnesia is simply non-existent in him. Those feelings have gone to ground: they’re layabouts, shirking their responsibility. He’s been stuck on a boat with Hannibal as his sole companion since Chiyoh left and mostly he oscillates wildly between extreme irritation and a sense of low-grade _want._ His name, or lack of it, is a point of contention between them.

He’s starting to fantasise about keelhauling Hannibal until he splutters out the truth. Hurt him, deliberately, in all the right ways.

Or tie him to the main mast and go to his knees, pull Hannibal’s white shorts down his thighs, bury his face between Hannibal’s legs and lick him wet and dirty. He’ll pull off slow, so the ocean breeze can tease over his flesh, and then resume with a rope in hand. He’ll practice sea-knots.  He'll let the memory of hitches and under-wraps come to fruition in his hands: a bow-line looped around Hannibal’s scrotum, weighing his balls down, a Garrick bend coiled so prettily around his flushed cock.

Three loops around the top of each thigh, to keep his legs spread, like garters on the defined legs of a dancer. 

He’ll watch the demarcation line between fibre and skin – between blue jute and rosy need – and lick the exposed head of Hannibal’s cock until it’s a weepy mess. Until Hannibal’s writhing, desperate.  Until he comes not sharply and _gratifyingly_ \- but dry and distant as the faraway shore - the sensation muted, denied by the rope.   Seb will suck him clean, he'll release the bow-line and use the same length of jute around Hannibal’s throat, tightening and squeezing until he’s semi-hard again.

He’ll be gentler the second time.  He'll unwind the Garrick bend and trace the beautiful patterns left behind on the engorged skin. He’ll suckle the grooves, nuzzle his balls, nip at his foreskin.  He’ll keep Hannibal on the mast until he has nothing left to give, until he’s soft and empty inside, until he comes with nothing more than a moan of worship.

He’ll give it up; Sebastian thinks hazily. He’ll say my name wantonly.

((((he has a dream sometimes, of Hannibal tied to a gnarled tree, rope coiled around his throat threefold. The line leads to an incredible beast, who tightens the pressure with every impatient stomp of its hoof, and Sebastian watches from a distance and thinks it’s not enough, it should be _his_ hands on the rope; controlling every sip of air. Hannibal speaks of love, body arched against the confining pressure; he murmurs soft as an entreaty _I see you)))._

“You’ll remember it on your own,” Hannibal declares. The words effectively knock Seb out of whatever fantasy orbit he was about to sink into, bringing him back to the present. Chagrined, he schools his features into neutrality.  There’s confidence in Hannibal's words. Seb thinks he means _You’ll remember me on your own._

Hannibal’s passport has him listed as Lucas Juergen, a Belgium national. His birth-date is 1965, making him twelve years older than Seb. The difference in age matches their relative appearances. His expression in the passport is direct, pleasant. His hair is longer than the prison-style cut Hannibal now sports. The suit is an eyesore. The patterns shouldn’t work but do and the choice in colour can only be termed as ‘brave’. His eyes are dark. The cut of his jaw, cheekbones, the shape of his lips make for an arresting countenance. In a crowded room he has the type of looks to turn a person’s eye. He’s the type of _person_ to twist their eye out of its socket for their impunity.

_What a handsome devil you are._

The boat rocks left to right, gentle as a cradle.

He hands Lucas’ passport over and digs in for a third, stashed at the bottom of the drawer. Seb’s hoping it might be an alternative to his current alias. He’d prefer something that a) didn’t sound like a saint or b) wasn’t shortened to a pet’s name.

Abigail Juergen stares back. At some point she’d been told not to smile at the camera – obviously, she’s delighted at getting a passport – the grin barely hidden. Her eyes are startling blue. Freckles adorn the bridge of her nose, splashed over her cheeks like a celestial storm. In this moment - with the whole earth to explore - she’s star-bright. Her passport is filled with stamps and in some illusory world Seb can hear her demand: _ask for one, you must have a stamp in your passport._

He stares hard at the booklet. The image of Abigail awakens a resonance, a chasm where monsters wait. He smudges his thumb over her image, leaves the whorls and loops of his broken identity behind with her, for company.

“My daughter,” Hannibal explains.

Grief coils into his rib cage like a rattlesnake, it poisons any other possibility to her fate.  He closes the passport abruptly and sets it back in the drawer. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry her memory has been denied you,” Hannibal replies, calmly. “Will --- you tell me ---the instant you remember something? Regardless of how inconsequential? I can give you perspective, coherency to a broken narrative.” I can give you context – as if regaining memory out of sequence is to be feared - beneath his soft cadence Hannibal sounds imploring?

Seb turns, takes a half-step forward.

He’s wearing cargo shorts too loose at the waist. They sit above the swell of his ass; display the arrowed v of his stomach, the musculature leading to his groin. Hannibal said the clothing would have fitted perfectly once but there was a significant time delay between stocking the boat and actually living on it. Seb spends most of his days shirtless - a concession to the sling - his body cleaved by tan lines.

He ducks his head, chin to chest, and comes to rest with his forehead against Hannibal’s breastbone, with his one good arm thrown carelessly over Hannibal’s shoulder. It feels good. Safe. He _wants_ to drape himself over the other man and so he does.

Audibly, Hannibal swallows. The hand that closed into a fist when Abigail’s passport was revealed slowly relaxes. Hannibal’s palm comes to rest against Seb’s nape, keeping him close. “Don’t hide it from me,” he repeats, “when the memories come back.”

Fear is familiar. Seb thinks it might be his earliest and truest emotion, but he can’t separate them enough to distinguish if the emotion originates from him or Hannibal, or if they’re conjoined in this too – experiencing it together – from opposite sides of the same coin and under different motives.

“I promise,” he lies.

 

{-&8&8-}

 

He was told he’d been in a coma for twenty-three days with a severe concussion and swelling of the brain.

His right arm was fractured in three places. There was a knife wound to the upper torso (the same side as his shattered arm); his cheek was a cross-stitch pattern of thread holding flesh together. There were fading bruises all over his spinal region, a storm on the back of his legs – blues, violets, all the colours of royal decree - and he was missing a molar where the hilt of a blade had slammed against his jaw line.

He was strapped tightly with bandages; so constricted, he’d awoken in a panic. Arm pinned to upper chest, fingertips brushing his opposite collarbone. The bandages had winded over his torso, under his armpit, torqued around his back to encircle his arm again and again, keeping it fixed in place. It might as well have been a straight jacket for all the movement it allowed.

The terror over-flooded him in a palpable wave.

“Steady,” Hannibal had said, flicking on an overhead reading light. He swung his legs down from the top bunk and dropped to the floor with one hand braced against his abdomen. Hannibal’s complexion was wraith-pale in the dim light. His short hair stuck up in spikes. Hannibal had reached out, held his face immobile between two hands, and tilted his head around to force eye contact. The joy that flooded through Sebastian was sharp, so unexpected, he had stilled instinctively. “Hush. You were dreaming.” Hannibal held him a fraction longer, thumb caressing his cheekbone, then relinquished his hold. He grabbed a water bottle from beside the bunk and pro-offered it politely. “Please, drink.  You must be thirsty.”

He had been dreaming of intracranial pressure, of pain in his head that kept _spiking,_ of being tethered, kept helpless. He had been dreaming of a smooth voice saying decompressive craniectomy ~ ( _it’s a lemon and thyme infusion, and more for my benefit than yours_ ) ~ of sticky fingers prying away sections of his skull-bone so his brain could swell without permanent injury.

He’d been dreaming of licking his fingers clean.  Of putting his hands inside.  Of cupping the damaged mind and inhaling the sea-salt tang of cerebrospinal fluid, to feel the charge of electro-pulses setting the hair on his forearms to rise. He had dreamt about leaning down and sinking his teeth into the brain, tearing away huge chunks, because he was never going to let go. Sebastian woke up with a whine between his teeth, tossed out of a treacherous sea. “You were going to consume me,” he had panicked, but the nightmare was already receding.

He was scared and he was exuberant and nothing in his mind made any kind of sense. The dream was spilling over into the hollow spaces where memory should reside.

Hannibal’s expression had faltered.

“Where – _who_ are you?”

The question was barely out before disappointment knifed through him, keen as a blade. The man sat primly on the edge of the bunk. He had the type of correct posture that spoke of recent injury. His gaze was incisive. In appearance, he didn’t seem put out by the question or by his own query when he put forward: “Hannibal Lecter. Tell me, how much do you remember?”

Disorientated, he blurted out the first thing: “You were going to cut my head open.”

There was the same glitch in his reaction. Hannibal actually jerked.

“True enough, once upon a time.” After a moments pause he had added: “When Chiyoh fished us out of the water you were unresponsive - and have been for three weeks - cerebral edema is consistent with a violent concussion.  But it’s not uncommon for comatose patients to ‘hear’ conversations taking place in their vicinity.  You must have heard Chiyoh and I discuss solutions to your predicament, including decompressive craniectomy, the surgical removal of the top part of the skull. In the end it wasn’t an option. We didn’t have the facilities, equipment, or an environment sterile enough to ensure your survival.” Nothing short of hospital care would have done: and that wasn’t going to happen. Hannibal would eat him before he allowed separation again. He reached out slowly, as if approaching a feral dog, and pushed an errant curl aside, fingers tracing an aborted line. “Thoughts and intentions aside - it didn’t happen – you survived with your fortress intact.  The swelling went down on its own accord: eventually, you awoke.”

“Chiyoh?”

“As per her promise she watched over me.  She saved our lives: although it took some persuading on my behalf to haul your body onboard. You were, in the end, non-negotiable.”

There are enough clues to make the intuitive leaps, to paint a picture of what might have happened.  Chiyoh, whoever she was, would have set sail the second Hannibal was on dry ‘dock’, leaving him behind to drown in the ocean. Hannibal must have treaded water; he must have shaken his head, stubborn, and kept his unconscious body afloat until Chiyoh agreed to take him first. He had a thousand questions, a hundred concerns, and an urge to piss like a racehorse.

Three weeks missing in a coma.  How many years before that?

He grimaced, feet moving restlessly under the thin sheet. He could hear the sound of rigging, of taut rope, the soft susurration of water moving beside the hull. The harsh cry of seagulls as they pin-wheeled in the sky. It was hot in the cabin. The type of stifling heat that made everything wet. Cautiously, he sat up.

The room was minuscule.

The wooden floorboards were birch, sanded back roughly for texture, along with the cabinets and drawers.  The porthole was covered over by blackout curtains. There was a plastic bag clipped to the railings on the side of his bunk - a urine line led out from beneath the bed sheet and fed into it - and when he moved his body upright, the uncomfortable knowledge something hard was shoved into his dick. Right.  He stopped moving abruptly. A bead of sweat made its way down, sliding from behind his ear to his collarbone.

“What happened to us? And before you answer _don’t_ lie…if I wake up tomorrow with my memory intact and find out you’ve deceived me I’ll - ”

“We were attacked by a serial killer you were tasked to find.” Hannibal interrupted smoothly, before Seb could formulate an actual ending to his sentence.

I’ll what _– kill you? Leave? Never trust you again?_ He stopped, mouth agape as Hannibal continued.

“The knife wound to your shoulder and cheek were the direct result of a confrontation between the three of us, as were the lacerations across your back when Dolarhyde threw you through a broken window. Similarly, the bullet wound to my abdomen came from him.   He’s dead: The Great Red Dragon; I tore his throat out while you eviscerated his scaly stomach.” Hannibal tilted his head and said with the faintest trace of bemusement. “Ring-a-ding-ding.  Any of that sound familiar?”  


	2. Chapter 2

“And the memory loss? The broken arm?”

He’s not well enough for this discussion. In retrospect (all thirty seconds of it, since his memory is like a fucking goldfish) the _coma_ might have been preferable to this discussion.

Hannibal’s eyes gleamed. “We went over a cliff, you and I, a fall from an insurmountable height.”

Seb tilted his head back and fixed him with a dead-on stare for the dramatics. “Yet here we are.”

“Fate intervened. It wasn’t a suitable ending for the likes of us. Another must be found in its place.”  

“And we’re convalescing on a boat instead of recovering in a hospital because - ?”

“You asked for the truth?”

“I’d say it’s my state of preference.”

Sarcasm doesn't seem to make the slightest dent on him.

Hannibal took his measure for a long moment and then shrugged: “Until recently I was an inmate at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.   You were responsible for my incarceration _and_ for orchestrating my eventual escape from the facility. I imagine the FBI, as well as U.S Marshalls and other law enforcement agencies are combing the coastal region, searching for clues of our continued existence.” Hannibal leant back a fraction, a smile curving his mouth. “You’re free, of course, to make of your own actions whatever you will.”

In truth, it sounded like a clusterfuck.

There’s only one exit and Hannibal had positioned himself directly in front of it.

Seb breathed out; eyes roaming over the drawers, taking stock of defensive weapons and his own mental landscape.

Wrestling with the man while fully naked wasn’t a viable option, especially _not_ with a catheter inserted. And while he could feel the hair on his nape rise at the prospect of sharing a cabin with a killer, there was the other half of the info dump to contend with. He’d let Hannibal go. The injuries they’d sustained were in defence of one another. They’d murdered the Dragon together – with teeth and knives – with no sign of mercy or any quarter given. In the aftermath, Hannibal had elected to keep him alive rather than abandon Seb to the ocean.

In truth, Seb _wasn’t_ frightened of Hannibal, or his calm recitation of events. If anything he was curious, tight with a growing sense of anticipation.  

It never occurred to him that either of those emotions might not be his own.

He squeezed the bridge of his nose and put it all off in favour of other concerns: “Can you tell me where the head is?”

“Of course.”

He watched with unfolding horror as Hannibal unclipped the empty bag from the railing. Unceremoniously, Hannibal dragged the sheet away, his movements brisk and professional. He unscrewed the line from the catheter and left the stunt of plastic wedged as it was. There was nothing untoward in Hannibal’s actions but Seb wasn’t expecting the other man to get his hands so close to his junk with barely three sentences exchanged.

Knuckles - infused with warmth – skated across the inside of his thigh as Hannibal withdrew the line.  

Every muscle in Seb’s body drew taut. Hot and unaccountably flustered at the proximity. It stood to reason Hannibal was the one to have inserted the catheter in the first place; stood to reason he’d be nonplussed about its removal.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you blush before,” Hannibal intoned.   The quality of his voice was soft. His accent thick enough Seb had to tune his entire body in to listen, shoulders squaring to face him, head inclined to pick up on any subtleties. It gave Hannibal his undivided attention and he could _see_ the quick flare of pleasure it gave him, the way Hannibal basked in it.   “The head is the first door on the left. I trust you can manage the rest? Be aware there will be some irritation when you remove it.”

“I could have managed the first part.”

He was on the back foot and trying hard to cover the embarrassment.

Hannibal regarded him. Expression open, as if constructed parts of his person-suit had cindered away in the atmosphere - burned up in their plunge to mother earth – what remained was elemental, the blackened core of him.

The slow pulse of want felt hunter-patient.  Tireless.

It colluded with the embarrassment already present, muddied the ground beneath him. It turned everything into a quagmire. The flush in his cheeks deepened; blood travelled south at a rapid pace. His torso flushed pink. Heart-rate tripped into double, then triple-time. The flesh between his legs thickened. The step by step processes of a quickened pulse. Seb squirmed, broke eye contact immediately but the _need_ was pressed into his nerve-endings, smeared across his thoughts. The plastic inside his cock moved imperceptibly; the sensation not unlike nails dragging over a blackboard as he filled out around the intrusion.

Too much; too intense, too self-aware and too _watchful_. His hips jerked.

Hannibal’s eyes sharpened, chasing the movement. “Don’t get hard. The catheter traverses the entire length of your penis and resides in the lower abdomen, at the entry to the bladder. The inflated balloon can’t be removed if you curve upright into an erection, the ‘u-turn’ won’t allow for it. You’d have to wear it like a sex-toy, like a sound - wedged open and unable to come – you’d have to stay like that until you were soft again. Penetrated. _Needy_.”

Everything that fell out of his mouth was clinical. Everything Hannibal said felt savagely filthy.  

Seb shuddered. He flattened one palm against his aching dick and encouraged it to stay down. “Wha –“

“You are missing memories, including key strategies you once employed to cope with an empathy disorder. Your forts are non-existent.” Hannibal maintained his position, no closer, no further away. “At the moment, emotionally, you’re an open ground.”

“I’m feeling what you’re feeling?” He gritted out.   “You’re _enjoying_ this?”

He twisted around to snatch up the discarded sheet, and bit back a moan when everything inside juddered too, set into motion by the abrupt movement.

There’s a moment of panic when he believed the catheter might vanish, swallowed up inside, and he pinched two fingers around the protruding head to keep it in view. It poked out obscenely - like a cocktail stirrer - and that wasn’t a good association, it flared his imagination into overdrive. He tried to coral his thoughts, to keep them from free-floating. He wondered if ramming his broken arm into the wall might help; tip the scales from voyeuristic pleasure and back into the realm of pain. Eventually he flopped onto the bunk with the sheet draped over his hips.

He stared at the support struts for the bunk above.

Hannibal looked away, with a sense of delayed politeness that didn’t fool anyone “Possibly. Or whatever you’re feeling might be entirely on you. I’m not in a position to say, I don’t share your particular ‘gift’. Your disorder provides a certain grey area among the psychiatrists of today…it keeps everyone who’s ever encountered you on their collective toes.”

Talking helps. It distracts from the immediate predicament. If he concentrates on formulating a response then he’s not so aware of other parts of him. “I feel like this is a thematic argument we’ve had before.”

“Indeed. At the time your rebuttal was: ‘I know who I am, doctor.”

Even he can see the irony in that.

“Those words are a little hard to summon at present. You said I had coping strategies? May I ask what they were?”

“Tics and tricks. You avoided eye contact. You had a particular talent for conversing with someone while staring over his or her shoulder into the distance. The first time you and I met, you mentioned forts, but I believe the structured formality of walls ill-suited you. In later years you confessed it was closer to a stream in your mind’s eye: of standing in the centre of a great river, forever moving, forever buffeted by the whims of the eddies. Forever letting the current move through you. It was in better keeping with your own personality. You’ve always been fluid in nature.”

“Hard to hold?”

“Harder to keep,” Hannibal answered, wistfully.

“Tell me, when we first met – was the fort actually you?”

Sturdy walls. Impenetrable keeps. Eyes like tunnels through black granite, twisting through the foundations of a haunted castle. Hannibal seemed overly familiar with coping strategies. Seb was still staring resolutely at the bunk, trying to think of _other_ things, but he could feel Hannibal’s smile, sharp and bright as a dagger.

“I prefer the term memory palace.”

“No castles for you.”

“No good associations to be found there. You and I were always alike, identically different in our outlook. Are you feeling better?”

He was. His heart-rate had slowed. He wasn’t in danger of getting a hard on for no good reason, and the only emotion swirling through his head was immense curiosity/confusion. He was sore everywhere. Belatedly, he asked: “What’s my name?”

He had the impression Hannibal had said it frequently once. That it was poised on the tip of his tongue even now.

“Will you follow this line of questioning every night?”

“Until you tell me my name, yeah. It’s not an unreasonable request.”

“You’re wilful when it begets you. I have utmost faith you _will_ remember your identity in your own time. But in some occurrences, it’s best _not_ to push the psyche too far. That’s enough for today.”

That sounded like the type of advice one imparted and never actually believed. Certainly for this man. Incredulously, he stared at him. “You have no difficulty telling me you’re a violent criminal, but you think my _name_ is going to push me over the edge?”  Hannibal stood up. He moved away from the bunk until his spine was braced against the opposite wall, and made a curt gesture. _After you._ Clutching the sheet around his hips, he tried not to wince as he leveraged himself upright.

Best to seek the head before the catheter became problematic again.

Behind him, Hannibal said. “Perhaps I want to hear you say it first.”

 

{-&8&8-}

Life with Hannibal was remarkably easy - carefree – if you discounted the gaping holes in his memory, the slow recovery of his broken limb. Seb couldn’t raise it much further than parallel to the deck. He couldn’t grip anything worth a damn.

On the boat there was no outside communication with the world, no tablets, no internet connection; it was an isolated bubble in time. There was a working radio in the pilot room that Seb eyed uneasily every day, before he stuttered away, moving passed it with a unhurried grace. Despite that, he spent most days _frustratingly_ /happy – _suspiciously_ /content.

He sought the other man out like someone denied human contact too long. He knows, intrinsically, it can’t be correct. There’s a tan line on his wedding finger. Whoever he was, he’d been married once. He feels no urgency to ask about the whereabouts of her or him; there’s a line of animal instinct, running deep, that warns him to leave the question be. They’ll touch land sooner or later.  He’ll get his answers then. Seb doesn’t know when he took the wedding band off; but their separation couldn’t have been more than a few weeks.

He finds Hannibal on the upper deck, soaking up the sun as if he hasn’t seen it in years. Seb sprawls beside him, their bodies perpendicular, aligned into a perfect T.  

When Hannibal inchworms his way upward – as he does every morning - Seb pretends stillness. He doesn’t object to having his stomach repurposed as a pillow. There’s a feline pleasure in Hannibal: it's seen in the slant of his eyes, in the looseness of his sun-kissed limbs, in the way he can't be in Seb's presence without rubbing up against him.

Hannibal catches his eye, the smile uninhibited. He rolls onto his belly, drapes himself fully over Seb’s torso, hanging on as if he’s a life-raft. Anchoring him down. The _touch_ is wanted. _He’s_ wanted. He _wants_ to. It’s a blurring of identity that’s harder to shake as they reach out to trace one another, to find those intricate moments of connection.  Peace.

“Did you do this on purpose?” he muses. “Isolate us in the middle of the ocean so you could experiment on my empathy? You don’t want anyone else inside my head. You want me filled up on you.”

“No.”

He can’t tell if it’s a confirmation or a denial. Either way Hannibal seems unperturbed.

Seb’s fingers find the brand, they flatten between Hannibal's shoulder-blades and press down: the skin puckered with heat where someone had the audacity to claim ownership – as if Hannibal were a beast – and Seb feels the mayhem alight under his fingertips. There’s no reference for the anger, only it strikes at the heart of him like flint to a stone. Restless with the feel of it, Seb changes tactics: “Aren’t you disappointed? It must hurt: a narcissist like you; knowing you’ve been wiped so thoroughly from memory.”

“Did you choose those words carefully?”

“Like fucking pack hunters -”  Hannibal, inexplicably, laughs, a puff of warm air against Seb's belly. He squints one eye open and stretches his entire body out, toes pointed, thigh muscles flexed. The boat steadies.  Seb watches the clench and release of his buttocks as Hannibal resettles.  “- but I think they’re set to purring,” he concludes, sourly.

“I miss you greatly, the person you were and the history we shared. But I don’t begrudge this moment in time – to see you unmade by society’s rules - to see you roam free.”

“Bullshit,” Seb argues. “I have an _empathy disorder_. You want to see me through the prism of you. I don’t even have a history I can use to shore up against you.”

“There you are,” Hannibal murmurs, and clutches him closer, pressing his lips against the worn smile on Seb’s stomach. “Dear boy, there you are, but please do mind your language.”

“Fucker,” Seb taunts. Hannibal bites him, tongue sliding across the ragged line of his stomach, as if trying to reopen his smile again.

He’s content.

They’re content

(and worried)

(and pissed)

(and waiting for it to all come crashing down again)

and beneath that there’s the oldest emotion still; a clawing fear that sets his mood to prowling, that makes him want to scratch and claw until _something_ breaks free. “What if my memory doesn’t return?”

Hannibal’s eyes grow cold. He says, insistently: “It will.  Given enough time, you always return to me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian flight attendant, is on record for surviving the highest fall in history without a parachute. Her plane exploded over Czechoslovakia, in 1972, at a cruising altitude of 10, 160 metres. She passed away in 2016, at the age of 66.


End file.
